“Do you want to watch a 90 minute video about Five Nights at Freddy’s lore?” has become an inside troll joke around our house. And, yes, I have watched it to prepare for this year’s Five Night’s at Freddy’s (FNAF) birthday party game We moved into a new house with a roomy basement and a […]
It’s that time of year! Since my daughter has been 7 years-old, I make an elaborate puzzle-based scavenger hunt for her birthday party. It’s still covid-19 times, so everything was planned to be outdoors. Due to this, I had fewer hiding places than I normally would, so I used a number of small wooden chests […]
For the past few years, I’ve been designing scavenger hunt parties for my daughter’s birthday party. This was originally born out of her love for Gravity Falls and all the secret codes throughout that show. So far I’ve made parties for Gravity Falls, Warriors (the cat books, not the colorful gangs), and Yo-kai Watch. This […]
For the past few years, I have designed and created an elaborate scavenger hunt for my daughter’s birthday. As I started this year’s, I realized I never documented last year’s Yo-Kai Watch Scavenger Hunt! The Set Up My girlfriend’s sister is an amazing cake artist, so I know what I wanted to do – a Yo-kai […]
There is a good deal of debate on the value to randomness in game design. Many designers have a snooty idea that randomness is a crutch. Other designers, especially board game designers, will tell you randomness is a key component of a successful, long lasting design. It’s easy to see randomness everywhere in games. Most […]
At some point in time you are going to have to cut the scope of your game. You are going to run into a resource issue be it time, money or people, or perhaps a certain feature took 10x longer to implement than planned. It’s going to happen. When scope cuts come, they feel like […]
Recently we put our our first balance patch for Project Exonaut. Here is an overview of the process, data and how I reached the decisions of what to change. Assumptions I wanted to write down some assumptions before I dove into the data to see if my instincts would be correct about where improvements were […]
Updated this week, faction stats are now a measurement of weekly performance. This means faction stats will remain a bit closer, making competition more fierce! Other changes: Bobo Regen and Jetpack decreased from 4 to 3 Gwen’s damage increased slightly Congratulations to Banzai Squadron for being so dominant! Now is your chance to catch up Atlas Brigade!
Balancing Act Over the past couple of years I have been working on character-based competitive games. These are the kind of games where the word “balance” is repeated ad nauseam. As a (somewhat) competitive fighting game player myself, I have strived tirelessly to make our games as balanced as possible. I have created complex tables to value character abilities, poured over win/loss […]
Project Exonaut CN Games Studio’s newest game, Project Exonaut, has launched! This is the biggest game our studio has ever built. This is our first 3D game as well, though the gameplay is in 2D. If you played our previous shooter, Ben 10 Bounty Hunters, you may recognize the core gameplay but Exonaut is amped […]